If you call your hacking conglomerate Evil Corp and steal tens of millions of dollars from banks and individuals over the course of a decade, you can probably expect an indictment at some point. For alleged Evil Corp leader Maksim Yakubets, it came this week, as US and UK authorities charged him and an associate […]
Just before midnight somewhere in the western United States, a white pickup truck’s high beams light up a stretch of dark highway. The driver slows as his three passengers peer through the cab’s front and rear windshields, looking for the headlights of any cars that might catch them in the act of trespassing. “Let’s be […]
Ewoks. Just saying the name evokes myriad emotions in Star Wars fans. For some, the bear-like creatures that first appeared in 1983’s Star Wars: Return of the Jedi are part of the franchise’s rich tapestry. Others consider the Ewoks a blight and would prefer they not exist at all. (Some fan edits of Return of […]
The prominent hacker and Ethereum developer Virgil Griffith was arrested by the US government Friday after he spoke at an April conference on blockchain technologies in North Korea. The US government considers his presentation to be a transfer of technology—and therefore a violation of US sanctions. But Griffith’s defenders, including Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, describe […]
Happy post-Thanksgiving weekend! Hope you’re still in a turkey coma and survived the lively political discourse with your various uncles. As you shop leftover Black Friday and upcoming Cyber Monday sales, please be safe out there; it’s a scammer’s paradise. Oh, and think twice before you give a device with a microphone or camera, especially […]
For almost three years starting in the fall of 2015, a 56-year-old Chinese-American tour guide named Xueha “Edward” Peng would periodically carry out a strange errand: Every few months, he’d book a room at a certain designated hotel—first in California and later in Georgia—and leave $10,000 or $20,000 in cash in the room, inside a […]
Last weekend, Iran shut off the internet for nearly all of its citizens in an attempt to quell demonstrations. The government was able to do so in part because it had already spent years consolidating power over ISPs. Not only were the country’s 80 million people cut off from each other and the rest of […]
Internet-connected gadgets like lightbulbs and fitness trackers are notorious for poor security. That’s partly because they’re often made cheaply and with haste, which leads to careless mistakes and outsourcing of problematic parts. But it’s also partly due to the lack of computing power in the first place; it’s not so easy to encrypt all that […]
Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said Thursday that the impeachment inquiry had “poisoned the minds of fanatics,” and he was absolutely right—but not quite in the way that he meant. His comments, aimed at Democrats, instead came across in the hearing as projection, a sad summation of the intellectual rot […]
For well over a decade, identity thieves, phishers, and other online scammers have created a black market of stolen and aggregated consumer data that they used to break into people’s accounts, steal their money, or impersonate them. In October, dark web researcher Vinny Troia found one such trove sitting exposed and easily accessible on an […]